Abstract
The current processer of the textile wastewater treatment are mostly consisted of a combination of a physico-chemical and a biological treatment. The overall efficiency of these processes is, however, assessed to be fairly low. It is even worse during the summer season when temperature of the wastewater rises above 40$\circ $C. Therefore, a feasible process of the textile wastewater treatment which can work efficiently at higher temperatures was investigated in this work. We used a bench scale reactor consisted of one 4 liter anaerobic and one 8 liter aerobic tank, and the thermophilic symbiotic PVA degraders, Pasteruella hemolytica KMG1 and Pseudomonas sp. KMG6 that had been isolated in our laboratory. In the preliminary flask experiments, we observed that the thermophilic symbiotic PVA degraders could not grow in the wastewater substrate. Then, we isolated the mutant strains by acclimating the KMG1and KMG6 strains to the wastewater medium. The mutant symbionts (KMG1-1 and KMG6-1) were isolated through 6 times successive transfers into the fresh wastewater medium after 5 days culture for each. The mutant strains obtained grew well in the mixed medium composed of 75% wastewater and 25% synthetic medium, and supplemented with 0.5% PVA as a sole carbon source. During the culture for 14 days at pH 7.0 and 40$\CIRC $C, the bacteria assimilated about 89% of the added PVA. The symbionts degraded equally well all the PVA substrates of different molecular weight (nd=500~30000). In contrast to the flask experiments, in the reactor system the mutant strains showed very low levels of the PVA and COD removal rates. However, the new reactor system with an additional aerobic tank attained 82% removal rate of COD, 94% of PVA degradation and 71% of color index under the conditions of 5% inoculm on the tank 2, incubation temperature of 40$\circ $C, dissolved oxygen level of 2~3 mg/l and retention time of 30 hours. This result ensures that the process described above could be an efficient and feasible treatment for the PVA contained textile wastewater at higher temperatures.